


may the earth not receive thee

by superhumandisasters



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 2017 stucky scary bang, Fairy Tale Elements, Folklore, M/M, Monster Bucky Barnes, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Temporary Character Death, varcolac Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 04:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12573592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superhumandisasters/pseuds/superhumandisasters
Summary: He turns lightning away from barns, he scares children away from unholy places, he keeps the old ghosts company after their names have been forgotten.If the vârcolac had a grave, no one would visit. It is a forsaken place, and must stay forsaken.~~~After the helicarriers come down, the Winter Soldier flees to the Carpathian Mountains in search of silence, safety, and peace of mind. The vârcolac finds him first.





	may the earth not receive thee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AraniaArt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AraniaArt/gifts).



> This is part of the 2017 Scary Stucky Bang in response to a prompt submitted by the multi-talented [AraniaArt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AraniaArt/pseuds/AraniaArt):  
> "While on the run after the events of the Winter Soldier, Bucky has made his way to Romania. While in the countryside, he encounters a creature of Romanian folklore (a vampire, werewolf, or something of your choosing) and becomes one himself." 
> 
> I love this pairing, I love a good campfire tale, and I love folklore and cryptids - Romania (and Eastern Europe/the Balkans as well) especially has a rich, diverse tradition of folkways and history of unique creatures. I was excited to explore all of these, and thought the heightened reality of the MCU could be an interesting pairing to the slightly surreal world where Gothic tales play out. Please feel free to send me corrections or comments; I value your input.  
> (Keep in mind, while "scary" is in the title of this collection, and things do get bad for our supersoldiers, they don't necessarily *stay* bad. I'm going for more of a folklore/fairytale feel, so the content doesn't get too explicit.)  
> Thanks for reading, and Happy Halloween!

* * *

 

_May thou remain incorrupt_

_May the earth not receive thee_

_May the ground reject thee_

_May the black earth spew thee up_

\--thus cursed, the victim shall not find rest after death ( _The Vampire: His Kith and Kin_ , 1928)

 

 

_See these eyes so green_   
_I can stare for a thousand years_

* * *

 

 

He came into the mountains at the hinge of summer and autumn, to gold fields and blue forests.

In those early hell-spent months before he was hunting, he was running -- fleeing crowds and concrete, away from red memories and the gray apartment slabs communism had dropped like anvils on the old neighborhoods, grinding their bones to tombs. The soldier ran to the empty roads until his heart slowed, to the villages where married women still kerchiefed their hair.

Here was a safe place for anyone who could recognize a warning, but the soldier was built for different tasks. For all his vigilance, this blind-spot was part of his nature, just as the flashing reflections of water appear like glass to the sharp-eyed sea hawk. He couldn't read the signs, in part because the soldier wanted to be caught, and because he has always been a revenant.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Ioana estimates she has at least four more hours of pitching hay. After a long, hard week, she almost regrets shooing Magda back home to tend to the baby. So when she's given a fright by the figure building up a nearby stack, she assigns not having heard him to her exhaustion. He drops the pitchfork guiltily when she turns on him. Her shoulders ache, but she keeps her fork in hand, and she's carrying a knife that she doesn’t reach for, not yet.

He’s a big man, but Ioana isn’t afraid of men, especially not a big man who chooses to hold himself in a deliberately non-threatening manner, shoulders and eyes down. He’s obviously a vagrant; shaggy, with unseasonably warm clothes that have seen hard use. All of him looks hard-used.

“If you’re looking for work,” she warns, “I don’t have much money for payment.”

“Okay.” Dark hair falls into his face. She wants to brush it out of the way. He fidgets a bit before offering, “You seemed tired,” like he’s the one who should be embarrassed by her sore back, and surprises her again when he looks directly at her the first time. Behind the stubble, he has large eyes and a soft, shapely mouth. Younger than she thought. He couldn’t be a decade older than her son. And Ioana thinks about where her boy might be if her husband couldn’t spend months away selling his labor across Europe, if she couldn’t manage the farm alone, if they couldn’t barely afford a posh boarding school overseas.

It would be hard, to have no one. For no one to have you. A young man might end up clutching at his ragged hems for lack of anything better to hold, standing shamefaced in the hayfields of a stranger.

Her decisions come easier after that.  

She leans her fork against the bell-shaped stack and asks his name. He startles, paling further under his patina of road dust. It’s the first sharp expression he’s worn since approaching her, a blade flashing through his shy curiosity, then gone just as quick. He shrugs. “Radu.”

“Well, Radu. I have food, shelter, and fresh water. As much as you need. The rest can be negotiated.”

Radu finishes the field in less than two hours, and would have gone into the next one if she hadn’t stopped him. Ioana soon discovers he is occasionally forgetful, and sometimes needs to be reminded to stop working or to take a drink. By his fluid movement and the way his attention snaps into focus with penetrating intensity, she suspects he hadn’t been born with whatever ails him, but suffered some affliction later in life. He allows himself to use her water, but she doesn’t know where he sleeps. In the fields like a shepherd, she suspects, curled in a meadow nest -- he smells like warm grass in the mornings. Radu will eat anything she puts in front of him, though.

Her courtyard is already full of limping dogs and one-eyed cats. Perhaps she can afford to feed another stray (barely -- Lord, what an appetite!), but she can’t take in one that looks like this. Just because Ioana has a mother’s heart that clenches for Radu doesn’t mean she’s dead: his long sleeve shirts bunch and ripple like snakes from the muscle underneath, but he never takes them off, even when the tips of his hair drip with sweat and his face is ruddy with exertion. Imagine the gossip if she took in such a creature with her husband away!

He should be more suspicious, this young man who wears his name like an ill-fitting coat, yet the few times he opens his mouth, his language is curiously formal -- old-fashioned and genteel. She doesn’t know what to make of it, but she trusts her instincts, so she feeds Radu chicken and dumplings, and gets him a razor and toothbrush to keep in the guest bathroom. He works. It gives her more time to cook and send emails. She watches a movie and doesn’t feel guilty. She dreams of shadowed, claustrophobic hallways and cracked windows that bring in ice.

Too soon the reaping is done, and if she can’t keep him, she doesn’t like the prospect of him wandering off either, so she sits him down and tells him of a shepherding family who could always use a few hired men this time of year.

“Would you like that, Radu?” she asks tentatively. Ioana would rub his shoulder if he wasn’t afraid of being touched. “You would help with the milking, and keep safe watch over the herd and dogs. You can browse the raspberry hedges all day, and each night roast dinner over the campfire before bedding down in the heather. Wouldn’t that be nice?” She hopes the image pleases him as much as it does her. She can’t stand to think of him wandering loose again on the lonely road, or toiling deep in some mine.

Radu gives her one of his bashful, barely-there smiles, so she packs the razor and toothbrush, one of her husband’s old button-downs, and more food than even he can eat at once. “It’s a few mountains away,” she says, “but you are not to linger at the pass where the paved road runs out, or camp in those woods through the night. It’s a forsaken place, and must stay forsaken. Even on the farms nearby, you will not be allowed shelter should you arrive after nightfall.” She leans closer and drops her voice. “Do you understand? That is not a road I would be caught near on the eve of St. Andrew’s feast.”

The soldier who is Radu nods, because he understands following orders. He does not -- as she mistakenly assumes -- understand her allusion to St. Andrew’s Night, when the dead walk and wolves may speak killing words to men. The day’s significance means nothing. To him, all places and times are equally haunted.

Thus when he reaches the single fork in the road the next day, he follows it straight instead of taking the asphalt ribbon that jackknifes right and meanders deeper into the valley, as if the pavement fears straying too far from the civilization that birthed it. The soldier was instructed to not linger in this forest, and the unpaved fork is steeper but leads directly over the mountain. He will be dutiful and take the shortest route.

A chill engulfs him immediately, but the soldier does not find it refreshing. The path is deep-rutted but narrow, and thick oak branches twist overhead to weave a tunnel of shadow. The trees crowd closer the farther he gets from the mouth of the road, until the dapples on the ferns below are choked out and the keyhole of light behind him winks to nothing. A low mist reduces visibility, curling around his legs with each step. By the time he’s fully in the shade of the mountain, the woodland is so murky he can only navigate with the benefit of his enhanced eyesight. This does not disturb him -- darkness is familiar to the soldier.

He hears only his own footfalls. The fauna have gone mute. He loses time, which rarely happens anymore, but he must have, because when the soldier at last emerges into a clearing the sun is far lower than he expected. The path spits him out into a deep, timbered valley near what used to be a village. There are a handful of low buildings huddled together, but no voices, no motion, no breath of life. The cobbled square is as still and deserted as a museum exhibit, but silence, too, is familiar.

The architecture is all old, free of modern wiring. He estimates this hamlet has been abandoned for many decades, perhaps emptied out during the Cold War to fuel factories in some distant city. By the time he’s scouted the fullness of it, the sun has already dipped behind one wall of the gorge and the air smells of rain. He remembers Ioana’s warning about not approaching households after dark, but if no one is in the house, no one can turn him away. Perhaps he’s lucky, that this place is deserted, at peace in its hibernation. Loneliness is familiar.

He identifies the most defensible structure as a large dwelling situated above the village proper. The wooden walls are dark with age, but strong. After he sweeps the cobwebs from the top floor windows, he has sight lines for the entire valley. The soldier eats his gift meal slowly, reverently -- each exhale now visible as a cloud, the tips of his ears are going numb -- then he wedges himself into a corner for the night. His habit is to avoid fires while traveling alone, and tonight is no exception, but he does allow himself to fold the gift shirt over his knees so he might press his face against the cotton for warmth, and for the memory of kindness. The soldier knows he can push himself through almost anything. He’s endured far worse, and, tucked into himself like this, he can almost be comfortable. Cold is familiar.

The soldier goes to sleep trying not to think of the blond man, but he always does.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes knowing he is not alone. He feels it like gravity.

The soldier senses the weight of another presence, the way it displaces and reshapes the space around it, or by some other unnamed animal awareness that recognizes the intruder as both alien and kindred. Instinct keeps him frozen. He listens, scenting air too heavy with darkness for even him to see. He wishes he had kept a weapon other than his body.

Rain arrived sometime during the night, and the drumming on the roof directly overhead masks most other sounds. The soldier slowly uncurls, taking advantage of the pattering cover to crawl to the hallway. A frigid draft billows up from the stairwell, ruffling his hair and making his shoulder ache as he braces himself to crane over the rail and settle into a sniper’s stillness. He closes his eyes, focusing his other senses. A gust throws a sheet of rain against the house; its bones tick and groan in the aftermath of the blow. Wind whimpers in its eaves, in the rafters.

Two floors below -- under the thousand different notes of downpour -- something shifts by the front door. Nails whisper over its wooden face. He strains toward it with nerves of fluttering candles.

 _Crack._ The first knock rattles the hinges. The soldier nearly buries his fingers in the rail. Three more unmistakable knocks -- One. Two. Three. -- echo through the empty house, deliberate in a way the sounds of nature never are.

“ _James._ ”

He’s already down the first flight without knowing why. The soldier stops himself at the landing and crouches to peer at the doorway, afraid to look for the first time. Somehow, he knows the thing on the other side is not a person. Climbing roses flagellate the tall windows on either side of the threshold. Nothing shows itself but rain.

“ _James Buchanan Barnes._ ” Demanding, an order. It diminishes everything else in his brain to roaring white static. The thing knows him.

To be known is terrible, and irresistible. A sick noise escapes the asset’s throat. He watches from outside himself, as he’d done for the span of a lifetime, his chest a snarl of furious, helpless terror as his body creeps forward on its own. As if the world has turned sideways, and he’s stumbling toward his name and the weight behind the door as one falls into a pit. He slides back the bolt and lets in the storm.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Everything hurts.

The soldier coughs, and that hurts too. Pain rakes its claws from the back of his head to behind his eyes. It spreads over him in a throbbing cowl, down his spine, into his lungs and limbs. He moans through clenched teeth and turns away from the light. Sharp, wet stalks of grass scrape his face.

His right eye can’t be persuaded to open. He’s lying in a ripped-up patch of mud and broken sod a hundred yards from the big house; the door still gapes open. More immediately, his clothes are torn to shreds, and he’s covered in blood. His skin is tacky, clotted with it. Blood is all over his face and in his mouth, and the soldier has swallowed enough of his own to know not all of it is his. The flavor is dark, sweet, delicious. He retches, bringing up nothing but ropes of stained saliva.

Half-crawling, half-staggering, he makes it to the well by the gate and sluices water over himself until it stops running red. His shirt is hanging off him in ribbons, the gleaming left arm exposed. He can’t summon the strength to care. There’s an ominous, burning grind in the joints of his right leg. Damage. The soldier is tempted to drop where he stands and press his face to the cool flagstone, but the brightness of the full sun is punishing; his head pounds. It feels like coming out of cryostasis. Buckling under nausea, he drags himself back into the darkness of the house where the overgrown, feral rosebushes work as well as curtains. The short trip leaves him gasping with exhaustion.

He should at least close the door behind him, he supposes tiredly from the floor. Except no, it won’t matter now, he-- the soldier flinches.

Each time his thoughts approach the previous night, his mind recoils as if scalded. The horror is too raw, too immediate. Maybe that makes him a coward. What he knows is enough: Somebody hurt him. He’s missing time. Things were done to him that he can’t remember, except that it was bad, and it hurt him.

There was something he was supposed to do, a mission. Cross a mountain. If he can just rest a moment-- A full body cramp rolls over him like ground glass through his organs. In a moment of the most astounding pain he can remember in his long inventory of injury, his brain does him the kindness of blacking out.

The soldier drifts in and out of nightmares. He notices indistinct shapes flitting in the overgrown yard, strange shadows fall on the floorboards, a rustling in the bushes. He doesn’t dare to hope for bear or lynx. Again he futilely wishes he had closed the door, but it takes everything he has to crawl to the dust-clotted tapestry against the far wall. He curls the weapon over his head, it’s all he can do. The temperature is even colder on the ground floor tonight, and he shivers against the frigid air, and because of the heavy footsteps roaming the empty house and the scratch of claws running up the stairs. He’s in an alley, he’s in Siberia, he’s in hell. He can’t tell when night falls because he can see in the dark like it’s day now; he sees things that make him hide his face against his metal elbow. Muzzle flashes of panic flare in his sluggish brain.

Something pulls at his ankle and strokes the back of his neck with dry fingers. The soldier tries to cry out, kicking it away, but all his swollen, cracked throat can manage is a rasp.

The next day is worse.

Light from the cracked front door is unbearable -- bright, blinding and boiling. The soldier shakes too hard to sleep, dizzy from the drunk swaying of the floor he can’t rise from. Not since the violent withdrawal of his first free weeks has he felt so helpless.

He’s dying for water. The need wracks him, so powerful it pulls him from his body. Free, he skitters feather-light over the stones -- how, he doesn’t know -- to dip into the well and slake his thirst. He can taste the age of the rocks, sense the long journey of the underground spring and water that has never known the touch of day. It’s cold and dark and he could almost weep. When he returns to his body, he discovers he _has_ been weeping. He’s been dreaming again, yet how is it the flavor still lingers?

His vision fills with snow, the stink of the cells and his own rot. These are old memories, but many new things reveal themselves to him: glimpses of a distant, shadowed country where suffering is irrelevant. Time oozes and frays.

Between the moments of agony, there are confusing dreams of a man touching him with kind hands and good intentions. His beautiful friend, his beloved. The friend’s voice is so gentle, but his brow is pinched with concern as he smooths the sweat-clumped locks from the soldier’s forehead, saying, “Bucky, are you okay?” And the soldier would say, _No, no_.

With a pang of sadness, he realizes he won’t see the man again. Steve. He had hoped… well. A wasted hope is familiar.

The soldier thinks, _I have done all this before_. If nothing else in this strange house in a strange land, he has his old companions: confusion, fear, and pain. They stay huddled close around him as he slips out of consciousness on the chill bare floor.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

On the second night, the soldier dies.

 

 

* * *

 

 

On the third night, the vârcolac rises.

 

 

Like any newborn, he enters the world bloody and furious. His hands curl into fists, his fists curl into claws. Bones pop and reconfigure; anchors in his spine alter their construct. The weapon is more dangerous now than it had ever been, transformed by the same magic that alters his flesh.

He is made of teeth, and relentless. Rage gives him shape, and -- oh -- that breaks his lifeless heart. Whatever fool’s errand he tried to play before the end, the last and final truth is that he is what he always feared he was inside: a monster. An ugly, undying thing doomed to violence.

In life he was a ghost story, but that is not nearly enough for the vârcolac. A stray goat loose on the mountain will never satisfy him. No, nor stag nor bear. His mountain is thick with revenants and all the night creatures that lurk outside the works of man, and for those that cannot be killed again, the vârcolac is an instructor in terror.

The shades at crossroads and drowning holes are routed from their haunts. The chase leads him to graves where bodies should have been buried face-down and the coffins nailed harder. The old women who live in hollow trees he leaves alone, but the naked hag with nails like knitting needles, he drives back into the caves after a battle that leaves deep scores on the boulders, and keeps windows sealed tight for a week.

Unwholesome spirits once overran the nearest farms, crawling even up to the edge of piss-yellow sodium lights of larger villages, curdling milk and rotting eggs in the night-black barns; theirs are the shadows that send the cats into dancing fits and screams. Now cats only scream for the shadow of the vârcolac.

True hunger rarely takes him, not the way it used to burn low and constant in the coal pit of his belly. Once, to see if he can, he steals a chunk of braided sweet bread from where it sits cooling outside a convent kitchen, flanked on the sill by apricot-colored mums. Swirls of walnut and chocolate marble the inside, still hot enough to steam. It’s delicious, but two swallows in and the vârcolac chokes on the knowledge that this was meant for _people_. He buries the rest of the ruined loaf. It’s not safe to leave out scraps that have been tainted by him.

After that he meets his needs with the hot crunch of hare bones between his fangs. He runs down sweet-eyed does and empties them until nothing is left but a dessicated hide of mottled fur and bones. It feels right, to be disgusted by himself.

One moonless night, he’s tracking the rank scent of boar when the vârcolac hears the bleating screams of prey. A lamb is being dragged from a pasture, flailing against the thing astride it: naked tailed, matted, a rat-like beast the size of a heifer. It pulls long yellow teeth from the woolen flank and turns them to the vârcolac, regarding him with eyes of polished black glass.

Without thought, he closes the distance, and the taste of greasy hair fills his mouth when his jaws clamp down on the back of its neck. The goblin lets loose an awful, swine-like shriek as he shakes it like a rag and shakes it and shakes it long past the time it goes limp in his teeth. He tears a strip of foul meat from the mess of the rat corpse, and the lamb goes hobbling out of sight over the hill, back towards the gentle bell-chiming of her fold.

The mission, he thinks. He remembers there was something he was supposed to do.

The dogs are infuriated at first. Hackles up, they form a line, the smallest among them ready to die when he comes prowling the edge of their fields on four legs, or two, or none at all. The vârcolac never hunts there -- he springs every wolf trap and leaves them empty, but he doesn’t hunt for himself. The dogs eventually stop barking at him, but regard him with a wary eye. Their masters cross themselves when he passes by unseen.

Rarely a pale stranger is seen milling around village celebrations. He keeps his distance, hovering just outside the edge of the crowds. Longingly he watches, but makes no move to join the feast or the dancing circle, and no one invites in the only man whose eyes reflect a cold green light back from the bonfire.

He turns lightning away from barns, he scares children away from unholy places, he keeps the old ghosts company after their names have been forgotten.

If the vârcolac had a grave, no one would visit. It is a forsaken place, and must stay forsaken.

Once he sat on the fire escape with the friend, watching the city roll by on hot summer evenings. Now he sits on his roof and can see through years with closed eyes; he can see through the protective shell of the atmosphere to the endless night, a spinning void broken only by distant stars, through distances that beggar comprehension. He hears the small crawling things that live in the soil and the voices of the dead.

After his fledgling tantrum, he doesn’t let the transformation ride him again. He escaped the cage of his body once, and, reclaimed, it at last belongs to him entirely. The vârcolac stretches his limbs -- loose, purring, and marvelously free of pain -- into the shape of his choosing. Invisible, he drifts on ice crystals before they fall low enough to melt into rain, or he sprints on the underside of the river’s surface to feel how the currents caress his beautiful fur. Some nights find him lolling on a bed of fallen leaves, luxuriating in the simple pleasure of the full moon naked on his skin.

Every iron coin of comfort is carefully hoarded. The vârcolac despairs of another’s touch. His is a maw made for death, never kisses.

 

*****

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

***** 

 

He came into the mountains at fall’s twilight, to golden forests laced with orange and rust. Rivers threaded down from the peaks like mirrored snakes, drowsy in anticipation of the long, freezing sleep.

He was trapped in the pendulum swing of his own superstition. Half his heart had resigned that his beloved would never return to him, that their fate was to meet only glancingly in the long trajectory of their separate orbits. But in the fullness of his heart, the soldier knew that this was not a hunt he could ever abandon, and -- perhaps -- the remarkable circumstances of their lives were evidence that they would always find one another eventually; that if he could break free, drifting, gravity was sure to bring them back together. After all, a divining rod only works in a loose grip.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The first time the soldier overtakes a horse cart, it’s a crisp, cloudless day that promises an evening frost -- air like the first sweet snap of an autumn apple. The shadow trailing his bike is sharp and clean. The horse is pulling a load of firewood; cheerful red tassels wag from the tack behind its ears.

The soldier experiences a moment of temporal vertigo so intense he has to pull over. He’s in an Italian village he camped outside during the War. When he looks up, he expects to see columns of smoke streaking the horizon.

A bird lands on the fence post a few feet away. He blinks back to the clear, unblemished sky of the present. The driver offers him a friendly nod as the wagon bumps past, but the little girl beside him twists around to watch the strange blond man leaning on the motorcycle. Feeling foolish, he manages a wave. They turn off the pavement to follow wagon tracks into a field, which saves him the embarrassment of having to pass the farmer twice. He gets used to sharing the road with horses pretty quickly after that.

He’s been riding east since splitting with Nat and Sam in Budapest. All of them needed a break after Prague, and the series of raids on the secret bases buried around Hrad Houska, but he couldn’t sit still for more than a few days in the city, so he left them to soak up the hot springs while he hits the road alone to burn off whatever restless itch made its home under his skin. “To relax and see the sights,” he explains. Natasha doesn’t even bother hiding her eye-roll.

He doesn’t have much of a plan beyond renting a bike and wandering vaguely towards the Black Sea. He has no idea what he’ll do when he gets there, he just casts his hopes openly and widely as he can, shaping himself into a lightning rod built from vague reports, third-hand sources, and desperate longing.

When mountains start growing in the distance, their chain links the northern skyline to the south for a thousand miles, more than the eye can hold, and there’s no way through except over. The peaks aren’t as jagged as the highest Alps, but “gentle” isn’t the right word. Intimate, secretive. Rolling, folded ranges dressed in jewel-tones of the changing season. The roads thin out and get rougher the higher he climbs, forcing the soldier to ride slowly through the narrow, winding village lanes. Most of the young folks, he’s told, grow up learning English these days, but they escape soon for the city, so he speaks French with the older generation when he can, occasionally limping on his childish Italian, and gets by fine. He stops often. At first to wait for a flock of sheep to clear the way, and later to simply enjoy the dramatic plunge of a ravine filled by the slow gilted twirl of falling beech leaves. The ticking clock of life slows with him. His shoulders sit a little lower and easier; he chooses roads at random.

One afternoon he helps right a beached tractor, and no amount of wheedling can get him out of being dragged back to the owner’s home. He gets the full tour, gets stuffed with polenta and fresh cream and sausages and red wine, then gets stuffed into the guest bed. He’s lying there hours later -- staring up at the wooden rafters and hanging wall tapestries -- still a little dazed by the polite efficiency of his abduction. He can’t even move from the bed: a black cat with striking white points has him pinned down by the ankles. It cracks a dispassionate yellow gaze at him, then promptly falls asleep across his legs. Far away, deep in the hills, a wolf howls.

In the morning a huge breakfast is thrust on him, and the soldier is assigned the names of all the guest houses down the road he must stay at, all the households he has to visit. Most of the time he never makes it to the guesthouses: people are happy to share their homes and wifi networks, especially after panics of guilt drive him to any chore he can lay hands on. As he wanders deeper into the mountains, though, he’s less flummoxed by hospitality, less fueled by obligation, more comforted by the way hard work quiets the over-strung hum in his nerves.

He clears brush for a chessboard of Orthodox nuns. One of them comes to warm her hands by the fire, woodsmoke perfuming her flat-black habit, and instead of sharing Gospel she tells him the tragic story of the Handsome Son who sought youth without age, life without death.

He gets engulfed by a party that lasts all day and spills out into the entire neighborhood. He’s fed so much pork and strong plum brandy that he doesn’t realize he’s at a wedding until he’s part of the ceremony.

When the soldier chops up a fallen spruce, he’s invited to ride back from the fields on the wagon. He’s bouncing gently in the back when he realizes that he’s never been on a horse-drawn hayride before. This is the first time. If he were at home, there’d be pumpkins on the stoops and in the windows, and he knows they don’t do that here, but when the wind kicks up a flurry of orange leaves he starts grinning like a boy. He’s gone tearing through the wilderness before, but without the distraction of war, he finds himself a little embarrassed to be caught accidentally doing what he told Sam and Nat he set out to.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The world turns upside down when he’s been staying with the professor for almost a week.

He’s been herded towards “the professor’s house” for some time, so when the soldier finally arrives he’s surprised to find the epithet is simply the truth: Costin is a retired professor, still vigorous in his sixties, only mostly grey and only mildly eccentric. He carries what he calls a gesticulating stick because, according to him, he doesn’t need a stick for walking. After years of teaching literature at a Brussels university, Costin returned to the house his great-grandparents were born in, and stays busy keeping it alive.

Of course he’s heard about the soldier as well, and of course it’s unthinkable that the soldier should consider rooming anywhere else.

The layout is similar to other old-fashioned, communal households he’s seen in the area: one main house surrounded by a cluster of outbuildings and attached cottages that share the same style of colorful trim, their rambling porches all facing an interior, grassy courtyard planted thickly with flowers and fruit trees. More trees line the woven fence that terminates in a magnificently carved wooden gate framing the main entrance. The house’s few concessions to frivolity include two posts fashioned from dead trees, hung all over with decorative jugs, and the oddly carved trinkets nestled around the paving stones and hidden under window boxes overflowing with red geraniums.

All the professor’s adult children and nieces and nephews are either traveling or paying too much to heat their Bucharest apartments, Costin says, but he keeps up the property and lets out a few rooms; his widowed sister-in-law has converted the kitchens into a small bistro, and to the soldier it seems half the village ebbs and flows through the courtyard over the course of a day, though he can’t tell whether they’re patrons, hired help, or simply wandering by.

The soldier’s room has its own bath, but housing guests is obviously its secondary function: bookshelves line every wall from floor to ceiling except for an oasis around the window, which is flanked on either side by antique hanging clocks and a votive below. More books are stacked on the long parquet table beside his bed, which he suspects is usually folded into a couch. The bed floats in the middle of the rug like a quilted ship at sea.

The soldier worries that he’s turning a scholar out of his library, and he says as much when they’re outside adding mash to the backyard still.

Costin waves the stick at him. “Inconvenient? You’ve misjudged my character, Steven. This is absolutely an act of selfish convenience. Why wait for the gossip to trickle in piecemeal when I can secure access to the source? It’s good business.”

The old man seems to truly enjoy his company, though, more than merely presiding over it -- he wants to discuss art, books, their unshared past. The soldier does realize his position as a novelty, but it’s not in the way he minds. Less like a relic of freak superscience, more like an intriguing new renter in an old tenement. Nobody calls him Cap.

His days fall into an easy rhythm. He gets up early to do what needs doing on the grounds or anywhere else he’s been invited in the village, and when his muscles have worked to a pleasant ache, he comes back to the dining building for thick soups and stuffed cabbage leaves and all the news of the valley: who’s leaving for a funeral, who’s seen strange lights on the mountain. (And maybe it’s because he’s still picking up the language, but the vague phrasing strikes him as odd. By now he knows every mountain and hill has a name, but lost livestock are only called “the mountain’s tithe,” and mysterious night battles always happen “on the mountain.”) Then he’ll get distracted gathering up scraps for the dog that hangs around the courtyard. A shaggy gray sheepdog castoff, wide-shouldered and wolfish, but while the working dogs are so fearsome in the fields, this one accepts the soldier’s gifts with a melancholy gentleness. (“Of course,” Costin explains. “He’s nobody’s dog. What would he be guarding?”) They’ll sit on the porch -- the soldier and the professor -- and they’ll sip fiery backyard brandy and chat plumes of steam into the dark. Perhaps the soldier will read for a while before drifting to sleep surrounded by the scent of old books and the patter of evening rain.

That’s how it goes until it can’t go any farther. Call it a premonition. The soldier is wrapping old bread and bits of chicken into a napkin after supper, when the divining rod lurches in his chest. He whips his head up. Across the table, Costin is catching up with a farmer woman from outside the town, and the soldier’s barely been listening, but he only just stops himself from grabbing her wrist.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he interrupts, “but you mentioned luck... and two outsiders, uh, _din afară?"_

The woman nods over her coffee. “A few months ago. Another young man showed up out of nowhere, and I kept him as a farmhand during the hay harvest. He saved my poor back, praise be. A little odd, but a hard worker.” She winks at the soldier. “Almost as handsome as you.”

His throat goes dry. It takes a few attempts for his voice to recover. “And about my size, but a little shorter? Did he have dark hair, kinda long?”

Her smile flattens. “Why?”

“Or he might have cut it.” God, he sounds like a madman. He doesn’t care. “He would have light eyes.”

“Is he in trouble?”

“No! Maybe.” He rushes to clarify when her expression turns thunderous, “I mean, not from me. If it’s the person I think it is, he’s-- he’s a friend. And he’s not in trouble, but he might need help. I think he might have come this way. Please.”

She still looks suspicious, but the soldier turns the full force of his sincerity on her. Blood is rushing through his ears. Several adjacent diners are pretending to study their phones.

After a moment she sets her coffee cup down. “He is dark-headed. Past his shoulders. Radu is a good boy,” she says it like an ultimatum. “But. He might need help.”

The soldier’s heart jumps to his throat, even as his stomach plummets at how easily she concedes Bucky might need help. He presses his feet hard against the floor so he won’t fly apart.

“ _If_ you really want to find him, and _if_ you’re really his friend,” she says, “I sent him to Bogdan to help with the fall grazing, since the herds are spread over two valleys. Don’t use that information I gave you to make any trouble.”

“Ioana.” Costin intercedes by laying a hand on her arm. “Bogdan has no new men. Only three days ago he was complaining about being short-handed again.”

“What?” Both Ioana and the soldier turn on him.

“There’s no Radu there. There’s no new anyone. I’m sorry.”

“But I told him,” she argues, “I gave him clear instructions to go up the road, past--” she suddenly pales. “Past the mountain, around the land beyond the forest.”

“Oh dear.” Costin moves his hand to his brow. “Oh.”

“I thought he understood. I swear I did.” Ioana looks stricken.

“Of course. It’s not your fault, if that’s what happened. The mountain has a way of drawing people to it.”

The soldier can’t believe what he’s hearing. He stands up from the table fast enough to push his bench back a few screeching inches, including the three other people still sitting on it. “What is this mountain? Where is he?”

“No!” Ioana says, “you mustn’t go there!”

“I _mustn’t?"_  His eyebrows nearly climb off his face. He hopes he sounds as incredulous as he feels.

“It’s…” She flushes from white to red, visibly struggling. “It’s dangerous.”

“If my friend is somewhere dangerous,” he enunciates slowly to keep his temper in check, “then it’s very important that you tell me. Right now.”

He waits for something besides more silence, his vision blurring around the edges, his face is prickling. He thought he knew his host, these faces, that he was welcome and safe here until they got between him and Bucky. Bucky, who crashed headfirst back into his life out of nowhere while Steve was wrapping up table scraps. Jesus. Who are these people? Where the hell is he, what is he _doing?_ Then he realizes everyone is staring back up at him with variations of the same disbelief. He’s the only one standing and shaking with his fists clenched. Looming. Ioana’s eyes are shining wet.

“Steven,” says Costin. There’s nothing playful in his expression. He’s never looked or sounded more like the grandfather he is than now. “You have every right to be upset. We’re all worried. But it’s also late, and this is a lot to take in at once. I promise to help you any way I can, but I’m not about to let you go tearing off alone into the night. Why don’t you feed the dog, take a hot bath, and meet me on the porch when you’re calm enough to talk.”

A wobbly exhale pushes itself out of his chest, shamefully close to a sob. The soldier scrubs his face. “Sorry,” he tells his palms. “Sorry.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The plum brandy doesn’t go to his head, but after a while it sits in the soldier's chest as a heavy warmth.

“It won’t be what you think,” Costin says. “There are dangers, and dangerous people. Bandits. The geography itself.” As if on cue, thunder rattles the sky. “You see?” He claps his hands to echo for emphasis. “Even this late in the year, the mountain weather is erratic.”

“I’m not worried.” He isn’t. He’s settled into a low, intense burn.

“I understand that, Steven Rogers.” Costin levels a pointed stare at him. “I think you are a man who doesn’t appreciate half-measures, so I’m telling you clearly: don’t stop in the road, don’t stray from the path, don’t camp in the forest. If your Radu is still on the mountain, you might find him in the old village. But when you get there, the first thing you do is find a good sturdy house. Lock the door after dark and answer for no one.”

“But what if--”

“No one!” Costin snaps. “Even if they call you by name. There’s no good reason anyone should be asking for you by name in a place like that. Don’t be a fool.”

The soldier has never met a single one of these relentless evening criminals Costin is so concerned by, but he doesn’t argue. He studies the hand-drawn map he’s been given as though he hasn’t already committed it to memory. He’s almost afraid to consider the implications: he could see Bucky as soon as tomorrow.

A call rises up like a distant siren. Neighbors answer, the whole chorus of wolves. He thinks about Buck out there in the storm, in the woods, surrounded. “Are they dangerous?”

“Wolves? Rarely. Sometimes.” Costin sips at his drink, thinking, but eager for a new subject. “You should be fine. It’s a complicated relationship, many thousands of years old. The wolf is a predator, yes, but also a patron saint, a healer, a companion of the dead on their final journey to the infinite. ‘Feared and loved’ I was going to say, but that’s too cold, too Machiavellian. I prefer to think of them like Blake’s ‘Tyger.’ Do you know it?”

“ _Burning bright,_ ” the soldier recites in English, “ _in the forests of the night."_

“ _Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"_  Costin frowns into his empty cup, then sighs. Whatever secret troubles he’s been evading have evidently circled back around. He says, simply, “We’ve had a strange few months.”

“Me too.”

The storm rolls over the peaks quickly, clearing out to unveil a net of stars. They sit and listen to the howling weave itself into the darkness. It isn’t unbeautiful.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Frost lies heavy on the ground at dawn. He settles his accounts quickly, and there’s not much to pack; he’s strapping the duffle and his wrapped-up shield to the back of the bike when Costin approaches to say his goodbyes. After, he hands the soldier a small bundle wrapped in a handkerchief. “A parting gift,” Costin explains, shifting his stick from hand to hand.

The soldier gasps as he pulls the cloth away. It’s a small knife -- or perhaps a letter opener, since it’s so short -- and obviously very old. The end of the handle is styled into a wolf’s head, but its features have been softened by many hands. The entire piece is made of a silvery, dense metal that sits warm against his fingers.

“I can’t,” he breathes, turning it over and over. “This is too nice.”

“You’ve been a nice guest. I want you to have it, keep it on you as a memory.”

“Thank you,” he says sincerely, carefully placing it in the jacket pocket over his heart. “For everything.”

He swings a leg over the motorcycle and kicks up the stand, feeling a little awkward. “Considering how nervous everyone’s acting, uh, should I be carrying a crucifix as well?”

Costin blinks at him. For a moment the soldier thinks his attempt at levity has gone awry, then the old man throws his head back and guffaws in surprised laughter. Costin smacks him on the arm. “I have one if you want it, but many things in the mountain are far too old for _that._ ” His mirth cools down and melts into something more serious. The professor’s callused hand tightens on his shoulder. “Do you know what ‘Radu’ means, Steven?”

He doesn’t.

“It means ‘happiness.’ I hope you find yours, but that, also, is my fear.” Costin looks grim. “They always come for loved ones first.”

 

* * *

 

 

Finding the abandoned road takes him more than an hour. His service keeps blinking out, then goes completely dead. The fork wasn’t on any downloadable maps, anyway. Right away he can see it’s so steep and pitted with loose rocks there’s no point in trying to ride it, and the soldier parks his bike at the wood’s edge before shouldering his bag and shield.

A thrill of anticipation greets him at the shadowed entrance. This could be the beginning of the end of a long search, and it’s hard to temper that wish even as he salts it with thoughts of mistaken identity, or Bucky fallen on some worse hardship. He strides into the shade with long steps.

The lack of sound is shocking. It actually stops him in his tracks, and the soldier turns around half expecting to see a door slammed shut behind him. Already, the sunlit strip of road seems so distant. Nothing else seems odd, except how much foliage the huge beeches and oaks have retained to make the path so dark even in late fall. Leaves are thick on the trail -- their merry colors muted by the dim light -- but they barely make a whisper under his feet. He reasons this could be attributed to the fog seeping around the tree roots and dampening the leaf litter to a muffle.

He glimpses movement in the corner of his vision.

“Buck?” he calls. His voice is swallowed without an echo.

There are no birds, he realizes. No insects, no rustle of wind or water. Nothing but the implacable silence of trees. He unpacks the shield.

It’s amazing how much difference a lack of direct light makes on the temperature. The soldier shivers and pulls his jacket tighter around him. The silver keepsake in his pocket is a reassuring weight; it's grounding -- something solid to stave off the creeping atmosphere of unreality. Progress is slow, not only because of the poor condition of the path, but because he’s sure he keeps seeing motion shifting between the trunks. The forest is too murky for him to catch sight of it, though, and he can’t trust the other senses he would normally rely on in the darkness. As if there were signs and symbols everywhere just beyond the reach of his ability. He strains to pick up anything more than the constant tingle crawling over his scalp, but there’s only quiet.

A tangle of roses lurches into sight from the shadow. The soldier draws in a shuddering breath and squints up at a clearing, realizing he’s stumbled to his knees where the trail gives way to cobblestone.

He should be euphoric to be out of the woods, he thinks, but after prolonged, constant alert, all he can feel is exhaustion. Like the forest has aged him ten years, or reverted him to the weak-lunged boy he used to be. He’s wet all over with sour sweat; he braces the shield against the ground and hauls himself upright.

He’s standing in the remnants of someone’s overgrown yard. Empty windows stare out at him, and the dreadful hush of the forest is even heavier than before. There’s a funerary air to the ruins he wades through, but it isn’t restful. More like a held breath, or the lull before the trap springs to its fatal close. The low fog has bled between the houses and climbed up the valley walls; curtains of haze draw in, hastening an early nightfall, and he’s confused again by how long the trek from the road took him.

He almost startles out of his skin when an apple thuds to the ground.

The soldier shakes himself. Evening is crowding in, and he needs to find shelter, if for no other reason than a break from looking over his shoulder.

The house with the apple tree is in better shape than its cadaverous neighbors, even if he’s disturbed by the way the fruit trees around it are mounded by the rotting remains of their crops. The limbs bow precariously with the weight of unharvested yield that is left to putrefy where it falls, radiating a sickly-sweet, fermented stink. It’s excessive, like the thickets of sprawling flowers that choke every garden. He can’t even get to the door without being torn at by the strangling roses. Their velvet blooms are dripping from the fog, so swollen that their blackening, frost-nipped whorls slide open and burst apart as he brushes against them, littering him with petals and fetid incense.

It’s a perversion of the homes he’s visited, unwelcoming and so different from the comfortable hamlets and lively forests that lay behind him. This is a liminal place, half-reclaimed by the wilderness, yet outside of it. Frozen in a chrysalis state.

When he manages to pull open the door, he’s relieved to find the inside of the house is better preserved. His phone battery is completely dead, beyond use even as a flashlight, but enough late afternoon sun is trickling in through the windows for the soldier to recognize an oil lamp sitting near the entrance. It’s the old fashioned kind with a tall, curved chimney and a bronze handle, and in remarkably good condition. He’s struck by his first moment of luck: the wick is clean and the base is almost entirely full. The refined diesel smell suggests kerosene. It lights like a dream, revealing two hanging oil lamps set in red glass, and soon the room is washed in a pleasant glow.

By the size and shape of the large fireplace, he guesses he’s found the kitchen. The floor is so clean it looks freshly swept, and the whitewash walls are spotless. There’s still enough pink in the sky for him to slip out for firewood. He has to fight the roses again -- they leave fine, raised scratches along his arms like wounds from a cat -- and much of the wood stacked along the outside wall is so worm-eaten it falls to powder in his hands, but he finds enough dry, weather-hardened logs to carry in a full armload.

The door clicks shut behind him when he hooks it with an ankle, and he gets a good look at it for the first time. “The hell?" He sets down the firewood. The inside doorjamb is lined with locks. Heavy, metal sliding bolts. More than half a dozen.

The sight turns over something uneasy in his gut. One by one, he slides each bolt home.

Aside from the disquieting feature of the door locks, the kitchen is similar to ones he’s eaten in before, had they skipped being modernized. He unpacks a cold meal and looks around. There’s a long, solid wooden table across from the cooking area, and a pump handle sink in the corner that gushes clean water when he gives it a try. The dining area, at least, retains some vestiges of its former life: he can imagine the family preparing meals by the wide hearth where utensils and cookware still hang on hooks along the mantle, laughing together with neighbors over the table. Enjoying each other’s shared lives before whatever terrible thing it was that drove them away.

He bites back the disappointment of not finding Bucky. There wasn’t time to explore the expanse of the valley, so there’s still a chance. He hopes Buck’s safe and warm, wherever he is. He imagines being welcomed by him. Light from the fireplace plays like orange static behind his closed eyes, the dryness of its heat presses against his cheeks.

Without a phone he has no idea how late the hour is; all the gears in his internal clock have warped and broken their teeth. For lack of anything better to do, the soldier rolls out his bed on one of the wide benches against the wall, specifically the one that won’t put him right beneath the kitchen window. He puts out the lanterns, shores up the fire with enough logs to keep it crackling through the night, and -- hesitantly -- covers up the little window. The curtain is lovingly embroidered, soft as tissue with age, but not quite translucent. The thought of anyone being able to peer in at him during the night is too much to bear, and the idea doesn’t feel so ludicrous that he can brush it off easily.

He doesn’t go through all the rooms and draw their curtains, but he does block off the rest of the house by barring the kitchen’s interior door with a heavy cabinet full of crockware. Otherwise he’ll be up all night thinking about what might creep down from an upstairs window and render that series of locks useless.

 

* * *

 

 

The fireplace has steadied to a reliable coalbed, casting out a welcome contrast to the cool air. The soldier’s on his back with his long legs tucked to fit on the blanket-draped bench, idly studying patterns on the half-lit porcelain plate displays, because he appreciates the designs aesthetically, but mostly because it’s something nice to draw his eye when he’s drowsy but too heart-sick to doze off yet. The subtle movements outside are the natural kind of background noise he’s tuned out a thousand times late at night.

A howl rips through the air a dozen feet from his head.

He spasms in his makeshift bed. Spends a breathless moment trying to make sense of the sound, it’s so different up close. So much _more_. He’s only heard them from far away, deep in the mountains, and isn’t that where he is now -- deep in the mountain? It makes sense. It’s startling, but a little thrilling, too, until he hears the other wolf, then another one.

At least three wolves circling the house, maybe more. And that tickles a very old, ironclad part of his ape brain no matter what Costin told him about attacks being rare. The soldier goes stock-still; do they hear him, smell him? Is it curiosity, or has he breached some unknown, ancient territorial covenant?

A clatter comes from directly inside the room. He rolls to the floor in a crouch, every hair standing on end, breathing hard through his nose.

The oil lamp is juddering on the table, untouched, rattling in place. The erratic shakes resolve into a more regular rhythm; it starts rocking as if pushed by an invisible hand, deliberate as a metronome, and adds a tipsy twist on each beat: oscillating. The cutlery hanging on the wall starts quaking and goes vertical. Everything on the mantle, the knives in the drawers, all vibrating until they’re twirling on end like helicopter seeds falling from a maple, the whole room illuminated by the sharp, unhealthy glow of the fireplace. The blaze roars back to life in the color of burning copper. Pale green tongues of fire lap at the masonry, threatening to spill out onto the hearth.

The din is deafening; it rattles the foundation. The boards beneath his clenched fists tremor. The wolves at the walls have multiplied, overwhelming in their numbers, until it sounds to the soldier that all the wolves in the world have come caroling, that they’re going to shake the house down with the force of their howls. His shield lays useless on the floor; the plates he had been admiring moments ago are all spinning on their edges. Then, along with everything else, they abruptly fall flat.

Tools and the forks and the dancing lanterns land with the racket of a rummage bin being upended. The howls cut off in the same moment. He forces himself to hold his breath. Nothing left to hear but the guttering of fire. And the slow, cruel, piston slide of metal over metal.

The first lock’s bolt snaps back into its guide with a dull _clack_. After the span of a breath, the next sliding bolt begins to unlatch itself and slither home. They undo themselves from the inside while he watches, one lock after the other in lazy succession, performing a horrific burlesque. Five, six, seven. The last thick iron pin slides free, and the door swings outward.

The soldier can’t understand what he’s seeing at first. Shaggy black hair blends into the gloom behind it. For a flash it’s a man, but the dimensions of its body are wrong, then the sharp ears and full mane consolidate into the shape of a beast. The wolf is massive -- its head as tall as his chest -- eyes burning with the same cold green light of the hearth. But they aren’t a wolf’s eyes, are they?

Something inside it shifts with a sound like breaking saplings, and the beast rears up to stand on its back legs. Moonlight glints metal red off its left shoulder, the mismatched claws.

It’s impossible, but not more impossible than anything else in his unnatural life. It says, “Steve,” in a voice he would know anywhere, even issuing from this huge, wicked muzzle.

He can feel his face contort in a rictus of anguish. “Bucky, oh God.” One hand covers his mouth in disbelief, and to push back the rise of bile. His eyes are streaming. “Bucky, please.” From where he’s still half-kneeling by the table, he reaches out unsteadily to the wolf.

Green flames flutter wildly for a moment, and Bucky dissipates like smoke into the night. The door slams shut. The fireplace snuffs out, and all the bolts collide into their locks in unison.

The soldier crumples in the dark. The inside of his head is a riptide: there’s nothing safe he can grab and cling to, it’s all too much, too strong; every stray thought slips through his fingers and pulls him closer to inevitable drowning. He can’t move until the next day, only lie choking silently into his big, useless hands that can’t hold tight enough to anything dear. Alone, trapped in the shipwreck of a magnificent man-made body.

 

 

* * *

 

 

At next sundown he’s ready.

The soldier finds a blue-and-white wool blanket inside the house, and drapes it across his shoulders to protect against the approaching dusk. He waits for night in the open doorway, the dizzying fragrance of his bloated, corrupt crop washes over him in thick waves carried by the breeze. The garden is doused in falling leaves from trees where no birds sing.

For hours he waits, until the scene before him appears to be drawn in chalk and charcoal. Then, slipping from the treeline: the apparition of a man under the waning moonlight of the square. It approaches on noiseless feet over the cobblestones, moving with the shyness of a wild animal. It watches from a distance,  tall and pale, with eyes like sequins. The soldier tightens the blanket wrapped around him and says, “Bucky, come in.”

The door shuts on him so hard he’s thrown tumbling back into the kitchen.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Please come in,” he says in the forest, in the starlit meadow. In the empty streets and thresholds where ghosts cultivate fields of silence in dead houses: “Buck, come in.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

The manor broods on the mountainside, seeming to grow directly from the tree-studded rock face -- the country estate of some long-dead boyar, no doubt. It’s easy to imagine Chernobog unfolding from the enormous spired roof come Walpurgis Night, just as the soldier saw in _Fantasia_ before the War. The covered entrance gate stands two stories tall, its wood intricately carved with symbols devised by fur-clad tribes long before the time of Christ. The shadowed porch is decorated with similar motifs; its gardens are overgrown with the same morbid abundance as the cottages it reigns over.

Perched as it is, the great house receives even less daylight than the valley. Wearily, purposefully, the soldier makes the climb.

The front door is already cracked open, and glides forward noiselessly on wrought strap hinges. The light of his lamp reveals water stains on the floor; flattened, shattered furniture litters the entryway; long gouges on the rug and walls record a brutal encounter, stark against the somnolent drapes of cobwebs. Up he continues to climb, now on stairs of marbled walnut, deep through ruinous corridors. The sound of his footsteps hang in the still air. He chooses the windowless room with the vaulted ceiling and wide four poster bed, its sheets rumpled and faintly spiced with musk, as one might find in the den of a predator. The soldier kindles the fireplace, then drops himself on the foot of the bed. He watches the wood burn to embers.

He’s nodding off when a roar upsets the very bones of the house. The staircase groans under the weight of the ascending beast. The soldier grips his knees when, finally, two green cinders float into the hallway across from the open bedroom door. The soldier says, “Let me in.”

Another roar drops ice down his spine, followed by an answering roar from the fireplace in the same deathly green.

“What have you done,” its voice is hoarse and undeniably Bucky. “What have you done?” Its growl is bone-vibrating, a sealing tomb.

The vârcolac stalks in, fitful and wolfish, walking on the wall. It circles counterclockwise around him, so the soldier has to twist to follow the trajectory of its frightful weight. Lips curl back from teeth like daggers, eyes like lanterns pour light. It paces the walls in a frenzy, trailing smoke and weeping St. Elmo’s fire.

“Bucky,” the soldier offers a placating palm and makes his voice as soothing as he knows how. “Bucky, it’s okay.”

“No!” it howls. The vârcolac leaps to the floor with the coiled ease and power of a big cat. Snarling, and yet: how high the hackles, how tucked the tail. It surges forward in challenge. “Look at me!”

And he does, hand outreached and unmoving. He makes an offering of himself. His gaze is steady, and the beast is trembling all over. The fireplace throws out weird shadows, candles go flying off the mantle in agitation. Slowly, so slowly the vârcolac creeps forward. Nothing else on earth exists in this moment.

Only the questing stir of breath on his fingertips. Only his hands sinking into the vârcolac’s fur. He says, “I will never not want you.” He guides the mighty head to his lap, he strokes the shining pelt. They rest.

 

* * *

 

 

Steve wakes in gradients, becomes aware of a hot weight across his thighs. He’s not uncomfortable. The hair tangled in his fingers is expected, the expanse of smooth skin less so.

He struggles upright to find Bucky wrapped in furs and nothing else. The prosthetic is still startling, but the ropes of muscle and cut of his cheekbone are almost the same. Yet there is _more_ of him there, or he is more _there_ ; Steve isn’t sure. In the dull darkish hour, Bucky’s skin is pearlescent, as if his relationship with the laws of light and shadow have been rewritten. Even the scars of his shoulder look sculpted by vellum, like part of his original design instead of a byproduct of evil.

His nocturnal uncanniness is amplified when Bucky stirs and looks up at Steve. He’s become a pale, moon-begotten creature, and Steve’s heart breaks all over again. Reflective, luminous eyes; wine-dark, bee-stung lips; white, white teeth. He’s difficult to look at, impossible to look away from.

“Steve,” he rasps in that same voice, and slinks from the bed to the floor. With a defeated sigh, he lays his cheek back on Steve’s knee, nudging at his hand. Steve pushes his fingers through Bucky’s glossy, not-quite-black hair; he supposes the days of sun-kissed streaks are over. Locks float up and drift in the air as if suspended by water.

“I don’t know if I can die,” Bucky says after a while. He turns his face to confess into Steve’s palm, “Even if you slide that pretty little pen-knife into my chest and throw my heart in the fire, I don’t know if it will take.”

Steve goes still. He has forgotten the silver knife, and -- remembering -- instantly registers the weight of it in his coat pocket. Then he replays Bucky’s last statement and recoils, more repulsed than by anything he has yet seen. “I didn’t come here to kill you, Bucky! And I’m not going to,” he says, aghast.

Bucky sits back and stares at him. “What will you do, then?” he asks bitterly. “Haunt the ruins so you can guard my body when I go walking without it? Be my Renfield, feed me flesh?” He lingers on the last word, drawing it out, and Steve becomes aware again that Bucky is kneeling before him, naked as a stone.

“If I need to,” Steve says, forcing down a blush. “Do I? Will that help?”

“No.” Bucky looks away. “I don’t think so. I can eat regular food if I want, and the sun doesn’t hurt me. I don’t like it, though -- the light makes it harder to see, somehow. But. I do need meat, or blood, or both. I just get so hungry sometimes, I can’t stop it.” His voice hitches painfully. “It’s something from inside that drives you, but you don’t know what. It’s being alone. Outside of yourself, outside of time, outside of everything. It’s so--” He buries his face in taloned hands. “I know I’m a monster, but I don’t _want_ to hurt anybody,”

All Steve can do is cup those fierce hands and say, “Oh, Bucky.” Steve won’t leave him. The decision is complicated by his friends, his responsibilities, and the strange new world he has to protect, but he already knows the answer. He always knew. Now isn’t the first time he’s cast off everything to plunge into the deadly unknown for this man.

“You’re not a monster,” Steve says. “You always have to be dragged into the dark, fighting like hell the whole way. I’m the fool who keeps walking willingly in.”

By illustration, he takes the wolf-headed knife from his pocket. Bucky flinches, but Steve only uses the razor edge to draw a bright line across the pad of his own thumb.

Bucky’s expression goes slack in surprise. His eyes dart from Steve’s face to the cut and back. “I don’t need it, not right now.”

“You don’t have to need it. You can have it.” He guides Bucky to the wound, pressing his thumb over full, hungry lips. He says, “Let me in,” and the vârcolac takes him into the wet furnace of its mouth. Steve's heart rate kicks up as Bucky nurses; his lifeblood yearns to flood into Bucky, rushing at the offer to spill for his sweeping tongue. Bucky’s eyes drift half shut, and Steve caresses his hair again, encouraging those greedy little suckling hums. Too soon, Buck pulls off, finishing with a sweet kitten lick.

He looks up, pinning Steve with his gaze, nearly vibrating with intensity. Blooms of color sit high on his white cheeks. “You have to know: I can’t be used, can’t be trapped. Not again,” he whispers. “You have no idea, Steve, how strong I’ve become. How dangerous I could be.” Bucky pulls Steve’s hands from his hair to a loose circle around his throat. His flesh is fever-hot, warm like an infection. “This is the only collar I can ever wear again. I can’t go back.”

“Then don’t.” There’s a faint smear of red where Steve’s thumb strokes tenderly over his collarbone.

The vârcolac wails in frustration, ecstasy. “How do you do this to me, even now, even after all this?” Sparks fly from his engorged pupils.

Steve doesn’t answer. He keeps their eyes locked, listening to Bucky’s quick breaths, his silent heart. Watches Bucky bite his lip with a canine like an ivory scalpel. His blood is nearly black, welling up from the pillowy softness Steve only just pressed into -- his whole hand still tingles from the contact. Most of Bucky’s blood trickles into his own mouth; mesmerized, Steve watches slow droplets outline runnels between his teeth, and trace the seam of lips swollen by his recent depredations.

Steve lures him up into his lap, and drinks.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Steve braces himself for the next wave of pain.

“I don’t know how this works,” Bucky’s humid breath against his ear, voice brittle with distress. “I’m sorry, so sorry. This is all my fault. I’m sorry.” Steve hates how much this is hurting Buck.

“‘S just like,” Steve starts, but he’s interrupted by his own ragged coughs. He clenches his teeth around a groan. “Just like old times, huh?”

Bucky shakes his head sadly, and he’s right -- it doesn’t hurt like pneumonia and a bad back, it hurts like the chamber. It hurts like becoming. Steve can see in new colors, and Bucky is so beautiful like this. Steve wants to tell him, but his eyelids are so heavy; he’s so tired. He thinks he’s always been tired.

The next day he wakes to Bucky sobbing openly against his shoulder. Again Buck tries to give him more water, insisting Steve must be thirsty.

“Don’t leave me,” he rasps, “Don’t leave me, _please._ ” His face is wet with oddly thick tears. Some of them have leaked into Steve’s undershirt to mingle with the chronic layer of sweat.

“Like to see you try and get rid of me now,” Steve says, and attempts to wipe the tears away with numb fingers. Bucky shouldn’t cry, not ever again, he thinks. Even trapped under a killing jar of physical misery, he delights in the touch of Bucky’s face where it's pressed against his neck, is overjoyed to rest his stubbled cheek on the long fall of Bucky’s hair. There is nothing else he wants; he could stay intertwined like this forever. And Bucky is so warm, and Steve is so cold.

He nestles closer with a contented exhale, and dreams of running under a crimson sky.

Black, bare trees streak by at incredible speeds. He’s sprinting so fast it feels like soaring, so fast his paws don’t disturb the unblemished snow that rolls underneath him like spilled white satin. Clean winter fills him. He’s free and tireless, spurred to greater heights by the beloved presence running at his side. Treasured, dearest one. His heart swells with love. They’re flying together, laughing, delighting in their strength and the giddy endlessness of youth.

 

 

* * *

 

 

On the second night, Steve dies.

 

 

Every window shatters, a howling dirge rolls down the mountain. Nothing hunts in the hours of lamentation, and bells refuse to ring for miles. The moon bleeds into darkness, devoured by the sky.

 

 

* * *

 

 

On the third night, the vârcolac rises, and wakes his companion with a kiss.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This story owes a lot to the More Sumptuously Gothic Than Thou works of Angela Carter, specifically _The Bloody Chamber_ short fiction anthology and _The Company of Wolves_ , a film inspired by the book. If you even halfway liked this, check it out.
> 
> Double shout out to the people of rural Romania. If anything, I've underplayed your generosity.  
> X [an example of a household covered gate with pre-Christian motifs](https://i.imgur.com/cv6q7HU.jpg)  
> X [this impressive gate leads to a monastery, I believe](https://i.imgur.com/A2KORyI.jpg)  
> Gated entrances to households are common throughout Romania; these examples are from the Maramureș region, which is especially famous for its splendid, ornate gateways and a traditional culture that exists to this day. People still farm like they did 500 years ago, and traditional garb is still relatively common. Though I've never been to a mountain guesthouse that didn't have amazing wifi -- living a rural, old-fashioned lifestyle doesn't mean you're out of touch!
> 
> The Carpathian Mountains are one of the few places in Europe where wolves still have healthy breeding populations, and have never been hunted to extinction. For more than 10,000 years, humans and wolves have maintained contact here, and the local mythology and cultural identity reflects that. The Dacians - ancient inhabitants of what would become modern Romania - made the wolf-headed dragon their symbol. It has even been argued that their name for themselves derives from "daos," thus: The Wolf People. Regardless of etymology, the wolf remains an important symbol, and I put some of that in Costin's mouth. He's a lit professor, after all.
> 
> Speaking of Costin, I lazily lifted him and his house completely from life, and re-situated them a little deeper into the mountains: [Part of the house](https://i.imgur.com/QrcNbkB.jpg); [Steve's room.](https://i.imgur.com/JpwUY4i.jpg) This is absolutely a real place with real people, retired professor included.
> 
> [Carpathian Shepherd Dog](https://i.imgur.com/ped2vzk.jpg). You'd see variations and mixes of this everywhere.


End file.
